[tex-live] xetex.def

Joseph Wright joseph.wright at morningstar2.co.uk
Wed May 10 10:36:37 CEST 2017


On 09/05/2017 23:13, Karl Berry wrote:
>     what is the reason for having two .def files here.
> 
> I can't imagine an insurmountable technical reason for having two
> independent .def files these days. Indeed, it would seem highly
> desirable to me to merge them, with conditional parts as needed. It sure
> was a pain to be applying changes to both independently, when I was
> the one doing that.

'Yes'

> One of the reasons I was so happy to turn them over
> to you guys :).

Well the ideas originate from the team ... you'll see for expl3 we've
gone back to 'one definite source' as the number of drivers is nowadays
small and predictable.

> As I expect you know, they currently exist separately because of their
> historical development. xetex.def was based on dvipdfmx.def at the time
> of creating XeTeX. And that was reasonable during active XeTeX
> development. And so it has continued to the present day.  But nowadays,
> when dvipdfmx and xdvipdfmx themselves have been (sort of) merged
> (thanks always to Khaled ...), merging the .def files too seems good.

OK, I'll probably work on this but not before TL'17 release: somewhat
risky and not something I'd want to put on the DVD. (I will send the
latest update to CTAN to fix the issue concerning scaling of links.)

Joseph



More information about the tex-live mailing list